What had happened?
Something had happened.
He didn’t have to be a genius—though he was—to know that something was wrong.
A slow trickle of something ran down his temple.Sweat?He lifted a hand, biting back the groan, and swiped at the dampness.He brought his hand in front of his face and slowly opened his eyes.
Blood.
He was bleeding.He studied the smear until a shadow passed over him.
A buzzard.
He scrambled to his feet.No reason to encourage it.His gaze followed it, found several more circling with it.
Where was he?
He studied the distant mountains across the unwelcoming—and very empty—stretch of desert.
He turned.There was a bluff behind him, or the rubble of one?He’d been up there and then—
Memory jolted through his mind, stabbing deep.The device?
He turned, his gaze on the ground.It was gone—no, there it was.He picked it up and turned up the screen, but even before he saw the crack lancing across the screen he knew.
Stella had always said full power would destroy it.
Would she ever know she’d been right?
He shoved it in his pocket.
He thought he knew where he was.He didn’t know when it was, just that it was pre-agency.Pre-everything that had happened here.
It made zero sense to walk toward where the agency had been, but he started that way.
He’d done a lot of things that made zero sense.Why stop now?
Chapter15
Rita felt words wanting to tumble out of her mouth, mostly questions, but she pressed her lips together.
He wouldn’t answer her questions, but he could use them against her.Or he could use them to trick her into giving him information.Would a determination not to speak help her when he brought out the drugs?
She remembered the doctors telling her not to fight it, that it would be easier if she didn’t.
Easier for whom, she wondered now?It hadn’t been easy.And the lie detector had been much more intrusive than the one Mel had used on her.
She remembered what they’d told her.She’d believed them then.She didn’t now.
John had them trapped, but she would make it hard for him, as hard as he’d made her for her.
And then, the edges of the room flickered in and out of view.
Maybe they weren’t trapped?
The window behind John warped in, sucking him into it.What surprised her the most?He didn’t look surprised.His mouth was still moving when he vanished from sight and the window returned to normal.
“Something is different,” Con said, his voice low.
